Pavatar depends on your website. If I say I'm sunfox.org it simply will look for sunfox.org/pavatar.png (Actually it looks for the HTTP header X-Pavatar first, then for a link rel="pavatar" tag... on your homepage.)
This makes it distributed ! This could also be combined with your OpenID, to have for example youropenid/pavatar.png \o/
Thanks, Sunny, for the explanation, which now I’ve actually bothered to visit Pavatar, I can see is the case for myself :-}
The flaw in Pavatar, then, is the assumption that everyone has the knowledge to use their own web space. My mum, for example, would not appreciate that she has a web space with her internet access.
Discussion (8)
Why?
Slow and unreliable, mainly. Prefer Pavatar.
It's totally centralised. You depend too much on their servers and their service.
Is Pavatar distributed unlike Gravatar?
Pavatar depends on your website. If I say I'm sunfox.org it simply will look for sunfox.org/pavatar.png (Actually it looks for the HTTP header X-Pavatar first, then for a link rel="pavatar" tag... on your homepage.)
This makes it distributed ! This could also be combined with your OpenID, to have for example youropenid/pavatar.png \o/
In principle, pavatar is better because it's decentralized. But in practice, gravatar has more support. It's not as slow as it used to be either.
Thanks, Sunny, for the explanation, which now I’ve actually bothered to visit Pavatar, I can see is the case for myself :-}
The flaw in Pavatar, then, is the assumption that everyone has the knowledge to use their own web space. My mum, for example, would not appreciate that she has a web space with her internet access.
It doesn't have to be a paid webspace, any website with accounts can implement it.
For example if flickr sent the icon as a pavatar in the headers, she could use flickr as her webpage and have a personnal icon !
(Sending a pavatar is astonishingly simple, whereas getting a pavatar from an url is harder than getting a gravatar from an email.)